My Life In 35 Songs, Chapter 18: “Growing Up” by The Maine

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Photograph, remembering the summer…

I could feel it in my bones.

Driving home from college after successfully completing my freshman year, something told me that I was in for a banner summer. The calendar hadn’t even flipped over from April to May yet, but the air was warm and the sun was beating down and my car windows were open and the music was blaring. Getting off the highway, it felt like my hometown was welcoming me back with open arms. Somehow, I just knew I was about to live the greatest summer of my life.

I’m no great believer in clairvoyance, but my premonition that day is absolutely the closest I’ve ever come to predicting the future. Because, as it turned out, the summer of 2010 was the summer I fell in love with the girl I was going to marry.

There’s a special gravity to the albums and songs you hear for the first time right around the start of any new relationship, but that counts for double when it’s the relationship that’s going to last for the long haul. Such was the case for me with Black & White, the second album from Arizona rock band The Maine.

The Maine had come up as part of the “neon pop-punk” wave of the late-2000s, a micro-movement defined by uber-poppy, glossily-produced rock songs that sounded so bright you could almost hear the saturated colors in the music. Fast-forward to 2025 and The Maine have outlasted every other vestige of that movement, evolving into a widely-respected independent rock band whose music folds in influences ranging from Third Eye Blind to new wave to Americana. These days, they are one of my very favorite bands. Back in 2010, though, they were only barely on my radar.

The Maine were one of the openers on the pair of Boys Like Girls shows I saw in the fall of 2009 – concerts I’ve already discussed in this series. Touring, at that point, in support of their 2008 debut, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, The Maine struck me as catchy and fun but largely lacking in substance. Their live set staples were bratty, immature songs about mean girls and sex, with titles like “Everything I Ask For” and “Girls Do What They Want,” and a sound and vibe that reminded me of the American Pie soundtracks.

For these reasons, I was interested – but not overly excited – about Black & White, which was set to release on July 12, 2010. But the day this album released just happened to come on the heels of the weekend where I finally kissed the girl I’d had a big crush on since the previous fall, which meant I was listening to it a lot as the two of us struck up a relationship. It was those classic early days of a romance, where it’s all electricity and chemistry and heart-racing excitement. I had no idea what the two of us were, or what we could become. What I knew is that I loved talking with her, and laughing with her, and making out with her down on the beach late into the night, with the waves crashing on the shore and the summer stars gleaming above. And Black & White might not be a perfect album, but it’s pretty damn perfect for all of that.

The Maine’s second album sheds most of the band’s neon pop-punk roots, opting instead for shimmering road trip ready rock anthems. It’s a lot like Boys Like Girls’ Love Drunk, actually, just if you replaced Love Drunk’s very obvious Bon Jovi influence with a strong dose of Tom Petty-flavored heartland rock. It became my summer soundtrack immediately. I played it in the car a lot, usually when I was driving from my house to hers. It was definitely playing in the car on one of our first official “dates”: an evening spent at the local mini golf park. I remember getting back in the car after we finished playing, turning the key in the ignition, and hearing the laid-back guitar riff from “Growing Up” lilting through the speakers. It felt like a scene out of a summer teen romance flick, and I couldn’t remember anything ever feeling this good.

Technically, “Growing Up” arrived one year too late to be perfectly applicable to my life. The skeleton key for the song is there in the second verse, which goes: “Graduate, what’s a kid to do now?/Get away, we’ve got so much to prove/Because it’s time to move on and I start to let go/But then ‘Wonderwall’ comes on the radio/I flash back to the night in your parents’ yard/When we drank too much and we talked about God.” It’s technically a track about the fascinating “no man’s land” that is the summer between your high school graduation and your first semester of college. At that time in your life, you’re not quite in high school anymore, but you’re also not quite in college yet either. It feels like you have a little more responsibility than you’ve had before in the summers, but there’s still that urge to live it up and make the most of the time with your friends. “Growing Up” captures that unique feeling: of being ready to move on but also not quite ready to move on yet.

Even a year late, though, “Growing Up” felt pretty perfect. While I had a year of college under my belt, I was still feeling plenty tied to my high school self, my old friends, and my hometown. In fact, the girl I started dating that summer was an old high school classmate. She’d graduated a year ahead of me, and we’d never been much more than acquaintances in school – little more than a nod or a smile as we passed in the hallway. But we grew closer after we graduated, thanks to mutual friends and to the fact that, on breaks from school – whether it was summertime, or Thanksgiving, or Christmas – all the college kids who came back to town tended to hang out together.

When summer rolled around that year, I couldn’t wait to hang out with all my friends who’d been off at other schools, living brand-new lives. I spent the first month of my school break just catching up with people I hadn’t seen in ages, which felt amazing. After a confusing freshman year where I never quite felt like I belonged, there was something extra satisfying about slipping back into the embrace of home and falling back into old routines with old friends.

What wasn’t routine was the time I was spending with this girl. Something seemed different in our interactions that summer, and I felt it a little more every time I saw her. Those encounters mostly occurred against the backdrop of classic summertime hangouts: a bonfire with friends, a boat cruise on the lake, night swimming off a mutual friend’s dock. But every time we met, we seemed to draw a little closer, talk a little longer, stare into each other’s eyes a little more intensely. At first, all our hangouts were with groups of friends. Before long, though, we’d dispensed with those friends and were spending time together one-on-one. We went to the movies and held hands. We sat on the beach and looked up at the stars. We went down to the carnival and rode the Ferris wheel together. (I swear I’m not making any of this up, no matter how much it sounds like a Springsteen song.) Then, one night, I finally worked up the courage and kissed her.

The rest of that summer was a whirlwind. We had conflicting work schedules – she worked mostly mornings during the week, I worked mostly evenings during the weekend – but we spent virtually every waking minute together otherwise. That first night, we kissed until 1 in the morning and then talked until 3. And then I drove the 30 minutes home. It’s a good thing I wasn’t expected to be home before any sort of curfew that summer, because there were probably fewer than 10 nights across July and August where I made it to my front door before midnight. I’d never experienced a summertime romance before, and I found the entire thing to be utterly intoxicating. Looking back, I’m proud to say I lived it to its absolute limits.

The punchline to “Growing Up,” in the chorus, is that “Growing up won’t bring us down,” and I liked how that line seemed to reflect my experience. The highs of my last year of high school had crashed into the confusing loneliness of my freshman year of college, and had briefly left me wondering whether my “glory days” were behind me. That summer offered a rejoinder in the form of the best few months of my life. At school, I’d felt lonely and wondered if I belonged. That summer, spending my days and nights with the girl who made my heart race, I felt like I’d never feel loneliness again, and I knew I belonged. Maybe growing up didn’t have to bring me down after all. And maybe, my glory days weren’t in the past.

Maybe, they were just beginning.

Past Installments:

• Track 1: “One Headlight” by The Wallflowers
• Track 2: “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse
• Track 3: “Hide” by Creed
• Track 4: “Wheel” by John Mayer
• Track 5: “Kill” by Jimmy Eat World
• Track 6: “Fix You” by Coldplay
• Track 7: “Walk On” by U2
• Track 8: “Feeling a Moment” by Feeder
• Track 9: “When Canyons Ruled the City” by Butch Walker
• Track 10: “Truth Is” by Sister Hazel
• Track 11: “Breaking Free” from High School Musical
• Track 12: “Come Around” by Counting Crows
• Track 13: “Someone Like You” by SafetySuit
• Track 14: “Crashin’” by Jack’s Mannequin
• Track 15: “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen
• Track 16: “Go” by Boys Like Girls
• Track 17: “Ride” by Cary Brothers

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